Have a Happy Easter- IF YOU DARE!

I think the boys at DC were smoking a little too much Easter grass when they wrote this one.

I saw this cover over at Seduction of the Indifferent and the memories came flooding back. I bought this comic when I was eight. I tried to re-read this at HTML comics, but they don't actually have this particular issue.

The basic premise is simple: Some kids go to an Easter egg hunt which is hosted by a large, friendly-looking Easter Bunny and are, one by one, lured into a series of diabolical traps. At the end, all of the children have ended up in a big vat of chocolate in the basement of a scary old house. The Easter Bunny resurfaces, now looking like the one on the cover.

The bunny reveals to the children that he is bent on getting revenge for the hundreds of chocolate bunnies which are eaten every year. He plans to eat them (the children) and he "Always bite the heads off first!".

Like many stories in Unexpected, the twist ending doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Chocolate bunnies are, after all, just that. They are not rabbits dipped in chocolate. And if there really was an Easter Bunny, why would he suddenly crave revenge? It's analogous to Santa Claus vivisecting someone because they rip the paper on the packages.

Still, I must confess, this story scared the bejeezus out of 8-year-old me. I remember lying in bed, needing to pee, but terrified that the bathroom rug was really a trapdoor which would whisk me away to a vat of chocolate in the basement where that scary bunny (I can't even type "scary bunny" without cracking a smile) would eat me. We didn't even have a basement. Just a crawlspace.

Happy Easter!

Well, I Sure as Hell Didn't Expect THAT! Unexpected #210

I usually post something about Saturday Morning superhero cartoons of the 60's on Saturdays, or nothing at all. But today, as I wind down "Ape-ril In January" week, I thought I'd treat you all to a bonus.

Amy and I bought this little number at ChicagoCon one year for $0.25. It was purchased solely on the strength of the cover image.

Now, of course, I know that the above comic is from the Bronze Age, but it has a friggin' vampire ape on it! I have a soft spot for bronze age horror comics. With all the CCA restrictions placed on comics companies (self-imposed or not), it was nearly impossible to do a horror comic that was actually, well... scary. What you usually get is either a ridiculous, predicatable piece of tripe that is unintentionally funny (and therefore highly enjoyable) or, on rare occasions, something that manages to manipulate the limitations of the format and still produce something exciting- and when they're good, they're great!

The above comic is of the former variety. In fact, most issues of Unexpected from the 70's and early 80's are just plain awful. They rely heavily on twist endings, as the name would suggest, but the twists are usually not just unexpected, they're a complete non-sequiter. It almost works in a Dadaist or Absurdist way. I usually joke that a better name for this series would have been "-'The Hell?!?"

So, no, I can honestly say that a big gorilla with bat wings surprising a bunch of people in a grave yard was not something I would have expected. Mission accomplished!